The Railway Children Return — spirited follow-up to a beloved classic

Your first response to the thought of The Railway Children Return may be to squint at the maths. After all, 52 years have passed since Lionel Jeffries’ beloved 1905-set original, a film that for older British audiences will trigger a Proustian rush of damp Bank Holidays. To be clear, the new story is not a wintry drama of late-life reunion for the Waterbury siblings, Oakworth station soon to be doomed by the modernising fervour of the Beeching cuts. From among Jeffries’ cast, Jenny Agutter is the lone comeback kid — the actual children an all-new batch, stars of a modest but sweetly engaging adventure romp.

High Englishness abounds. The first 10 minutes alone offer the second world war, village cobbles, freshly baked scones and — naturally — steam trains. (At the sight of Tom Courtenay, I nearly shouted “Bingo!”) The year is 1944, Agutter’s Bobbie Waterbury still in rural Yorkshire, now a community pillar. History repeats itself with the arrival from the outside world of two sisters and their younger brother.

But where the Waterburys were affluent Londoners, the newcomers now are working-class Salford scamps, evacuees boggling at the greenery. They make a cheerfully scuffed presence in Oakworth’s Jerusalem, welcomed by most, assertive when not. The movie too has a likeably rude Saturday-morning energy. Not every scene is free of the air of an accomplished school play, but the knockabout mood speaks to a film deftly made to please crowds, not critics.

A hint of another children’s classic, Whistle Down the Wind, comes with the appearance of a black American GI (KJ Aikens), hiding out with a tale of violent bullying by US military police. The tirelessly outraged have become so already at the seeming intrusion of politics, despite the inspiration being real wartime history (the Battle of Bamber Bridge). Awkwardly for them, too, Edith Nesbit’s 1906 novel The Railway Children would today be called woke, her sunny humanism the fuel for Lionel Jeffries — as it is for Morgan Matthews’ spirited update. As ever, British nostalgia is a complicated thing.

★★★☆☆

In UK cinemas from July 15